Tag Archives: graphics

If you use Linux and wanted to play Dota 2 but have been discouraged by the limited graphics performance of integrated Intel HD graphics card, this post is for you. Intel HD 3000 is an integrated graphics card that came with Sandybridge processors. By default it is barely able to run Dota 2. With following settings, you should be able to play Dota 2 at an average speed of 30 FPS or above. The trick is to lower the graphics settings to make the game run faster. If you have newer processors you should get even better performance.

Introduction

If you buy a new laptop with Intel processors and AMD graphics cards, you by default run into this long running dual, hybrid graphics problem under Linux. This post is targeted towards new Linux users, who haven’t dealt with such kinds of problems before.

1. Introduction

I found lots of people struggling to get catalyst driver work in Ubuntu. This issue has been persistent for some laptops, ever since Ubuntu 13.04 came out, specially for Intel, AMD dual graphics setup. For people, who have been looking at catalyst drivers since http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1930450 post was published, should not be that hard to find the solution, but for those who are new to Linux, or don’t have time for these kinds of issues, this might be a show stopper bug.

It is not fair to say certain desktop environment is faster than others only based on fgl_glxgears’s output. There are many more factors than, just having some FPS gain in an opengl tool to consider a desktop environment over others. One more fact to consider, a distro which has say e.g. twm as default window manager might have more benefits (ease of use, performance) than running on Ubuntu. Following results reflect the output on my hardware, and might be different on yours even on similar setup.

Few years back, I was even unable to boot without using acpi off. When catalyst drivers started working on this hardware, it started to become better every time. With this new release the performance was even better. I was eager, how each desktop environment take advantage of this, so I wrote this article.